Sick of the Logmein.com email 'updates'? Annoyed that join.me isn't for Linux and aren't sure what the alternatives are? Linux.com has put up the second in their series of how to remotely control PCs running Linux with this installment focusing on Network Manager which is an OpenVPN client. Windows users may find Network Manager a little hard to grasp at first as it does not pop up a GUI of a remote computer so the article offers a good analogy, "think of OpenVPN as a virtual Ethernet cable to your server or LAN, all wrapped in a nice stout layer of encryption". Using OpenVPN creates a secure tunnel to the remote PC which you can then use to run secure (or insecure) applications such as SSH to interact with the remote machine.

"Greetings fellow Linux users, and welcome to the second part of our glorious OpenVPN series. When last we met we learned how to set up a simple OpenVPN encrypted tunnel between a home server and a remote node, such as a laptop. Today we're adding refinements such as how to daemonize OpenVPN so we don't have to start it manually, use Network Manager for easy connecting to our remote server, and access services."

Microsoft just picked up a big win in their battle against IBM and Amazon for a share of the Cloud now that the US Government has certified them as being secure. This is their first such certification which opens up a very large market for them and will make them more attractive to private firms as well. While most salespeople will tell you that the only thing that matters about the cloud is high availability, IT departments are far more concerned about security. High availability is assumed, if that is the only sales pitch a cloud provider gives you then you should probably stay away from them, your clients will be much happier knowing their proprietary data is secure and available as opposed to just available. Slashdot commenters await you.

"Microsoft's cloud storage platform Azure received their first government certification yesterday, less than 24 hours before the official shutdown. The certification, which grants Azure 'Provisional Authority to Operate,' should make it easier for Microsoft to compete with rivals like IBM and Amazon Web Services for government contracts. The certification signifies that the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and US General Services Administration have all deemed Azure safe from external hackers. Government cloud contracts are a lucrative market, as seen by Amazon's recent tussle with IBM over a $600M contract for a private CIA cloud."

If you haven't heard of the FIPS 140 Publication Series it is the Federal Information Processing Standard which accredits encrypted flash drives to one of four levels, with 1 being relatively secure and 4 representing encryption that is almost able to defend its self from penetration. Adding that level of security can slow things down, which is why Legit Reviews bought a few drives off of NewEgg to test.

"On paper it looks like the IronKey solutions should be faster, but you can't believe everything a company tells you when they are marketing a product they are trying to sell you. Since security is such a big deal to corporations these days we decided to order in these Flash drives and do some testing of our own. We've heard rumors and have experienced ourselves that review sites often get 'cherry picked' samples, so we ordered in as many drives as our $1000 self-prescribed budget would allow. You can look at our receipts from Amazon.com, TigerDirect.com and PConnection if you'd like..."